Katrina's other toll: Nearly 1,500 still missing

Families hold out hope for a reunion with those who can't, or don't want to, be found

By Allan Turner |
March 22, 2006

For Shirley Washington, life during and after Hurricane Katrina seemed an endless round of terror and heartbreak.

First, her New Orleans apartment flooded. She was trapped two days by high water. Then she recognized that her mother, father, sister, brother, daughter and son all had disappeared.

Washington was lucky, though. Evacuated to Houston, she located most of her family, scattered from San Antonio to Atlanta, in a matter of days.

For countless other victims of the Aug. 29 storm, the search for missing loved ones has been a long, lonely and often futile quest.

Almost seven months after Katrina's devastating assault on New Orleans, nearly 1,500 people remain missing. And hundreds of new missing persons calls continue to pour in even as workers struggle to reunite families, identify the dead and close the books on a massive human lost-and-found effort.

Operating out of leased offices in Baton Rouge, La., state employees, volunteers and now contract workers hired by the Federal Emergency Management Agency have logged approximately 40,000 missing persons calls. The calls, many of which reported the same missing individuals, resulted in the opening of about 13,000 cases.

At their height, calls were arriving so fast that staffers at what is now called the Louisiana Family Assistance Center could fill out only the first page of the eight-page missing persons report and promise to contact the callers later.

Now, said Henry Yennie, a Louisiana state social worker who was the call center's deputy operations director for much of its existence, as many as 150 calls are received daily. About 10 percent of them generate new cases, and Yennie said it likely will take the call center six months to wind up operations.

"Of the almost 1,500, we suspect there's a 'nugget' who are truly missing — washed out into the Gulf," Yennie said. "Then there's a small subset that honestly don't want to be found. How do we know when we're done? How long do you keep looking? What do you do when you've done all the DNA testing you can, when you've called everyone and you still can't find the person?"

Not wanting to be found

Yennie noted that some "missing" individuals were reluctant to be reunited with their families because of financial or domestic problems. Names of those who proved to be fugitive lawbreakers were passed on to authorities. About 900 bodies were identified through Yennie's operation. The total confirmed death toll on the Gulf Coast is nearly 1,600.

The Louisiana call center was the largest of dozens of efforts to reunite families scattered by the killer storm.

Reuniting children, parents

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, designated by the U.S. Department of Justice to help find missing youngsters, recently reported that it reunited 5,076 children from Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama with their families. In 12 other cases, agency investigators located adult relatives of dead children, said Bob O'Brien, senior director of the group's missing children division.

O'Brien said the agency continues to receive missing children calls.

Last week, the Arlington, Va.-based nonprofit group reunited its most recent family: Lisa Stewart, who had been transported from New Orleans to Houston, and her 4-year-old daughter, Cortez, who had been evacuated with her godmother to Atlanta.

The Stewarts could not be reached for comment for this article.

Washington recalled the chaos that surrounded her own rescue and evacuation to Houston. Unable to afford to flee the approaching hurricane, she said, she and her fiance opted to ride out the storm at their New Orleans East apartment.

As water rose, they fled to the complex's clubhouse, where they were trapped for two days. They finally were rescued by helicopter and bused to Houston. At the Astrodome, Washington met a distant relative who advised her that most of her family was safe in San Antonio, Baton Rouge and Atlanta.

But the whereabouts of her father, 65-year-old Solomon Williams, an Alzheimer's patient, was unknown.

Washington contacted the Louisiana missing persons center — and then she waited.

"I got through to a lady in Baton Rouge," Washington recalled. "She really kept in touch with me. She called several times."

A week before Thanksgiving, the staffer called with good news. Washington's father had been located at a Memphis nursing home.

Washington and her father have spoken by telephone, and a visit is planned soon.

Yennie noted that in many ways the Louisiana call center was flying blind.

Advice from experts seemed to have little relevance.

"They'd say, 'This is how we did it in 9/11,' but that was so different," Yennie said. "They'd say, 'Here's a model, but it probably won't work.' "

The first Baton Rouge call center operated 100 telephones 24 hours a day, seven days a week out of a hotel ballroom.

At first, the center received no federal funding — FEMA now has hired a contract staff — and staffers were state employees and volunteers. Workers had limited access to databases and, even after months of operation, they still have no access to federal records, Yennie said.

Draining work

After the center opened on Sept. 7, staffers received 600 to 700 calls a day.

"We didn't have any type of filters on these calls," Yennie said. "We got a lot of bad data."

At times, the center seemed a cauldron of despair, with staffers approaching emotional meltdown as they grappled with the needs of frantic callers. Volunteer chaplains circulated the room to offer comfort.

"They would hold up their hands," Yennie said, "and help would be on the way."